Al-Malik is shown full-figure, standing and bearded, wearing Arab robes and a Bedouin scarf headdress, with his hand resting on a sword at his waist. It's a fascinating image. It's a unique source for our knowledge of the dress and the regalia of the early caliphs, and it's probably the oldest known depiction of a Muslim. His pose is menacing, he looks as though he's about to draw his sword, and the lines below his waist are almost certainly meant to represent a whip. What we have is an image to inspire fear and respect, an image that makes it clear that the eastern Mediterranean now has a new faith, and a formidable new ruler. A letter from one of his governors echoes the image's implicit message:

"It is Abd al-Malik, the commander of believers, a man with no weaknesses, from whom rebels can expect no indulgence! On the one who defies him falls his whip!"

He cuts an impressive awe-inspiring figure-although a less reverential source tells us that he had such appalling halitosis, that he was nicknamed the "fly-killer". But, bad breath or not, Abd al-Malik was the most important Muslim leader since Muhammad himself, because he transformed what might have been merely a string of ephemeral conquests into an abiding state, a state that would survive in one form or another until the end of the First World War.

Abd al-Malik was a new breed of Islamic leader. He had no personal memory of Muhammad, and he shrewdly saw how best to exploit the administrative traditions of earlier empires-especially Rome and Byzantium-in order to establish his own, as Professor Hugh Kennedy, of the School of Oriental and African Studies, explains.